> I think that building a good UI for the desktop is only possible if UI developers agree on "look-and-feel" and that may be simpler for Canonical than for a co

> I think that building a good UI for the desktop is only possible if UI developers agree on "look-and-feel" and that may be simpler for Canonical than for a community like Debian and they came to the conclusion that building their own is just the way to go. Yes, and it seems like a number of other distribution developers have come to the same conclusion as well. We really need some thoughtful analysis about this trend. > AFAIK their home-grown desktop is FOSS, so it's not like you are buying into a proprietary system and this is tremendous. Source availability is part of enabling a broader developer community, but there's a huge amount of other work that is needed, as well. I haven't looked at the current state of Unity development, but the reputation of the project is that it is built for Ubuntu. > Ubuntu changed that and they really thought a lot about how to improve the Linux Desktop experience and IMHO they did very, very well. I totally agree: Ubuntu really was revolutionary when it started. It's kind of amazing how many innovative things Mark Shuttleworth and his team did right at the start. > That may be controversial, but I think there are often just 2 points of users; those that want it to just-work without any configuration and those who want to customize everything. I think Ubuntu is doing pretty well (currently, I hope that never changes) in both camps. There is also a third audience for any piece of software that is large enough to be programmable: developers. For desktops, you have third-party theme authors as well as application developers, people that want to work on the desktop software itself, maintainers of other Linux OS components, and folks that want to use the source code to build their own custom projects.